The story of Protect-U’s inception is better than most. Cosmic house duo Mike Petillo and Aaron Leitko are fugitives from the Washington noise scene, retreating from it after an evening spent listening to the sound of a man cutting the tip of his own little finger off run through a delay pedal. “Apparently it was going to come out on 12”,” Leitko told the heroes at Yellow Green Red. “For me, personally, that was a moment where I started to think, ‘There really has to be another path’.” That other path sounds, variously, like newworldaquarium, John Talabot, Anthony ‘Shake’ Shakir and the gods of logic escaping into a wonderful dream. A debut 12” of their encouraging, quietly moving bliss suites is out now through Future Times, and shows much progression since early days post-noise sounding like “William Orbit jamming with Wolf Eyes”. The sound of a sound furtively reaching out into the world.

d’Eon offers up more patient house music from across the Atlantic, the Montrealer’s four-four visions more club-ready than Protect-U’s if no less gut-deranging. ‘Prochaine Station’ is perhaps the most potent of the four tracks Chris sent over to me: ephemeral synth tattoos rippling with twilit optimism, bass sweating electricity to keep the buzz going. The vocals aren’t the strongest, but soaked in hymnal reverb they sound distant, anyway, from the scrutiny of prime-time clubland PAs, more akin to something you’d hear spilling from first-floor windows or a cassette player in the 1980s. Considering the pop-spirituality of ‘Across The Sea’, it’s no surprise to learn the two big bursts in d’Eon’s musical past came when his parents gave him a synth aged four and when he started playing the Tibetan lute in a northern Indian monastery after college. No surprise at all.

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